In Japan’s Holy War (2009), Walter Skya concludes that the “total assimilation of the individual into a collective body is the goal of all totalitarianism movements.” Japanese nationalism was “only one variety.” The assimilation of the individual into the collective body is conceived as a “moral imperative.”

According to Skya, the Japanese objective was to “absorb the self into the Emperor.” Or one can say that the Emperor would be absorbed into the self. In the ideal case, there would be no distinction between the desires of the Emperor and the self’s desires.

Rudolf Hess declared at mass rallies, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Hitler proclaimed to his youth: “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” Germans would unite with Hitler to constitute a single body politic. Hitler and Germany would enter into the body of each young German.

“Obedience” results when the leader and his ideology have been internalized into the body of each follower. Obedience is not simply an intellectual concept. The leader and national fantasy have become so much a part of a follower that he cannot resist “following orders.”

Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872-1961) was a key thinker in the development of Japanese nationalism. The armed forces, according to Skya, occupied a special position in Kakehi’s thinking. The Imperial Rescript to the armed forces, “One Spirit, Same Body” read in part:

Soldiers and sailors, we are your supreme Commander-in-Chief. Our relations with you will be the most intimate when we rely upon you as our limbs, and you look up to us as your head.

The ideal of absolute obedience grows out of this fantasy that imagines soldiers and sailors as “limbs” of a body with the leader as head. In this fantasy, followers have no alternative but to follow orders. How can a limb of a body defy the head?

This psychic state of obedience differs from slavery. The soldier or sailor who embraces the cause of the Emperor does not feel abused or oppressed. The Emperor’s desires are his own desires.

The ideal of totalitarianism is that there is no difference between one’s own desires and national imperatives. The individual disappears into the nation—becomes a cipher. He has so deeply internalized the mandates of his nation and its leaders that he does not object when he is asked to enter battle and become “obedient unto death.”

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” One becomes “everything” by becoming nothing. One abandons the boundaries of one’s ego, identifying one’s ego with the entire nation. Absolute obedience is the vehicle toward achieving omnipotence.

Bernd Wegner (1990) observes that the SS-man saw himself as an “integrated element of a social organism.” In the spirit of Nazism, the individual German was conceived as a cell of the body politic. The SS-man could not act autonomously any more than a cell can act separately from the body of which it is part. “Obedience” depends on the fantasy that one is part of a body politic.

Wegner states that the individual, in the eyes of the SS, was only a “fragment of the body politic to which he owed allegiance.” His value—the justification for his existence—depended on the “advantage he furnished the national community.” Just as the Japanese soldier existed solely for the sake of the Emperor and Japan, so the SS-man existed solely for the sake of Hitler and Germany.

As a “fragment of the body politic,” the SS-man had no alternative to—could not resist—obeying the commands of the body of which he was part. Like the Japanese soldier, he was asked to abandon his subjectivity—subjective will—and to internalize the “will of the Fuehrer.”

What is the purpose of “obedience”—of abandoning one’s subjectivity in order to follow the orders of an Emperor or Fuehrer? To achieve a sense of omnipotence by imagining the nation as a single body politic united under a single will. Hitler said:

It was necessary to give the German people that great feeling of community: suddenly out of the weak will of sixty million individuals there springs a gigantic mighty compressed will of all. Now it is not I who face the destiny of Germany, but an army of millions is at my side. I am part of this army: as individuals we may perhaps be weak, but taken together, nothing can break us.

Nationalism seeks the absolute unity of millions of people—under a single will of a leader (an Emperor, or a Fuehrer). The will of the leader becomes coterminous with the “will of the people.” There is no separation between the nation, its leader and the people. The country is united into a single “gigantic, mighty compressed will.”